What did I learn? This is an incredibly hard question to answer, or even attempt to answer. How can I start to encapsulate all that I have learned in a few lines of text? Besides, what I have learned in this class isn't learning in the traditional "formulas and word definitions" sense. It is more a learning of trends and future skills. The trends of where technology is going and the future skills of computer literacy.
I started my educational process with attempting to focus solely on technology/Web 2.0 and how that is evolving and where they are going in the future. I soon learned this was a futile effort; the sheer amount of information being released and interpreted daily was overwhelming. I could not possibly hope to keep up with learning about ever minute advance in technology, or every frantic blogger's idea on how to best change education. I needed a focus. Enter: education. It seemed logical. I'm currently enrolled in an institute of "higher education" and am dissatisfied with how education in America is progressing. Where to start, though?
With the help of Miller, I was able to locate a few bloggers who were able to succinctly sum up the problems in education and how the future (read: Technology and Web 2.0) was affecting education. Bloggers such as Karl Fisch and David Warlick allowed me to learn about the trends in education, and the opposition the incorporation of technology into classrooms was facing. As well as numerous articles and case studies I found online, these bloggers helped me to define Web 2.0's meaning in the classroom and how those tools can best be applied to teaching kids how to function in the changing world.
One of the most important things I learned was that technology is ever-changing; educators should not teach technology, but instead teach the tools needed to master all current and future technology. Computer literacy seemed to be one of the buzzwords I encountered most often; meaning that students should be taught how to be technologically savvy. This all makes sense. We were taught in middle-school how to make Powerpoints; now we use GoogleDocs. We were raised on Internent Explorer; now the vast majority of us surf the Web on Firefox. These are just a few examples of how what we knew changed, and how we adapted to that change. Whether that was because we were taught how to adapt to change or because we were forced to change remains to be seen.
Another important tenant (though that sounds too rigid for this topic) was "content over form." This relates to Web 2.0 and its difference from Web 1.0; as Warlick put it in my email interview with him, "Web 1.0 is a library, Web 2.0 is a conversation." Conversation, another buzzword. There is an important difference between the two types of "Webs", that is, how the information is being relayed and processed by the reader. Without going into painstaking detail, Web 1.0 was all about getting the information out there, Web 2.0 is about combining that info with opinions/facts from others and combining all that to create our idea of what we are trying to find out, and then sharing that information with others so someone else can benefit from it, and them sharing new information with us, and on, and on, and on.
I learned a lot else, about how technology affects our lives and about how we must always be ready to adapt to new situations, but it is simply too much to summarize here without being verbose and long-winded. It was both interesting and fun doing the research I did, though I think research is too formal a word for what I did; namely trolling the Internet. I hope that what I learned can be applied to my future in college and my future in the working force; Web 2.0 is not about interacting with the machine, it's about talking to each other.
I started my educational process with attempting to focus solely on technology/Web 2.0 and how that is evolving and where they are going in the future. I soon learned this was a futile effort; the sheer amount of information being released and interpreted daily was overwhelming. I could not possibly hope to keep up with learning about ever minute advance in technology, or every frantic blogger's idea on how to best change education. I needed a focus. Enter: education. It seemed logical. I'm currently enrolled in an institute of "higher education" and am dissatisfied with how education in America is progressing. Where to start, though?
With the help of Miller, I was able to locate a few bloggers who were able to succinctly sum up the problems in education and how the future (read: Technology and Web 2.0) was affecting education. Bloggers such as Karl Fisch and David Warlick allowed me to learn about the trends in education, and the opposition the incorporation of technology into classrooms was facing. As well as numerous articles and case studies I found online, these bloggers helped me to define Web 2.0's meaning in the classroom and how those tools can best be applied to teaching kids how to function in the changing world.
One of the most important things I learned was that technology is ever-changing; educators should not teach technology, but instead teach the tools needed to master all current and future technology. Computer literacy seemed to be one of the buzzwords I encountered most often; meaning that students should be taught how to be technologically savvy. This all makes sense. We were taught in middle-school how to make Powerpoints; now we use GoogleDocs. We were raised on Internent Explorer; now the vast majority of us surf the Web on Firefox. These are just a few examples of how what we knew changed, and how we adapted to that change. Whether that was because we were taught how to adapt to change or because we were forced to change remains to be seen.
Another important tenant (though that sounds too rigid for this topic) was "content over form." This relates to Web 2.0 and its difference from Web 1.0; as Warlick put it in my email interview with him, "Web 1.0 is a library, Web 2.0 is a conversation." Conversation, another buzzword. There is an important difference between the two types of "Webs", that is, how the information is being relayed and processed by the reader. Without going into painstaking detail, Web 1.0 was all about getting the information out there, Web 2.0 is about combining that info with opinions/facts from others and combining all that to create our idea of what we are trying to find out, and then sharing that information with others so someone else can benefit from it, and them sharing new information with us, and on, and on, and on.
I learned a lot else, about how technology affects our lives and about how we must always be ready to adapt to new situations, but it is simply too much to summarize here without being verbose and long-winded. It was both interesting and fun doing the research I did, though I think research is too formal a word for what I did; namely trolling the Internet. I hope that what I learned can be applied to my future in college and my future in the working force; Web 2.0 is not about interacting with the machine, it's about talking to each other.
